The Ad Council and COVID Collaborative are rolling out coordinated ad campaigns from multiple brands as part of a broad effort to combat hesitancy among some people to take Covid-19 vaccines.
“We are dealing with the biggest public health crisis of our lifetime and it really felt like we had to meet that moment with the most significant public education effort ever,” said Lisa Sherman, president and chief executive of the Ad Council, a nonprofit that facilitates ad campaigns promoting various causes. “We focused on: How do we begin to understand the issue of hesitancy?”
COVID Collaborative is an assembly of organizations and health experts including the NAACP, the Rockefeller Foundation and former commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration.
To kick off the joint initiative, dubbed “It’s Up To You,” Verizon Communications Inc. is running a digital ad showing people experiencing moments of joy together, concluding with the tagline “The best connections will always be IRL,” using an abbreviation for “in real life” that is popular in digital chats or texts.
Ad agency Pereira O’Dell, as well as Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, have created ads telling viewers it is all right to have questions about the vaccine. And Google has a digital ad showing emojis of arms with bandages to represent people who have gotten vaccination shots.
Ads in English and Spanish will appear across broadcast TV, digital, radio and social media beginning this week.
After conducting research with Ipsos Public Affairs, the Ad Council learned that vaccine hesitancy is nuanced, and that its initiative would need to include campaigns customized for different groups of people with different concerns, said Ms. Sherman.
The research tied hesitancy in Black and Hispanic communities hit hardest by the pandemic to distrust of government and medical community, for example.
About 40% of people in the Black and Hispanic communities feel like they have enough information to guide their decisions about getting a Covid-19 vaccination, compared with 60% in the overall population, according to the research.
Some people were also concerned that the rush to develop vaccines against Covid-19 might have compromised the quality, said Ms. Sherman.
The ads needed to make people feel like their questions were normal and justified, emphasize the importance of protecting people and their families, and make sure people felt empowered to make their own decisions, campaign organizers concluded.
The effort marks just the second time the Ad Council has launched a large coordinated effort with a number of nonprofit groups and brands, Ms. Sherman said. The first was the “Love Has No Labels” campaign, which advocated for acceptance, diversity and inclusion.
The initiative is backed by more than $51 million in donations from companies including Amazon.com Inc., Comcast and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., according to the Ad Council. The group is also targeting donations of ad inventory equivalent in value to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ad agency Pereira O’Dell developed the creative platform, “It’s Up To You,” and agency JOY Collective adapted it with content meant to reach and resonate with Black communities. Been There Done That, a marketing consulting firm that relies largely on experienced freelancers, worked on the strategy for the initiative to normalize hesitancy and answer questions.
The organizations are also coordinating their work with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Biden administration more broadly, Ms. Sherman said. Some of the work will include the CDC logo.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at [email protected]
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